


In Every Sea

by scioscribe



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Consentacles, Gen, Other, Sea Monsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-25 18:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16665670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Hickey has a destiny.  It just doesn't look like a bear.





	In Every Sea

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "cephalopods."

There was a second creature. Hickey had seen it: a restless shadow under the ice, a cloud of ink spreading out underneath his boots like they were faulty nibs. Always following him.

He was on watch the night it broke through the pack. Call it, he thought, an assignation.

He stayed still and quiet, smiling while everyone else was gasping with horror. Getting appalled never served a purpose, did it? And he wasn’t so choosy as to push away amiable company.

The creature was a great squid, its damp and reverberating skin the color of steamed crabs, its eyes lidless and the same shade as his own. There was something unnatural about its head, a sunken quality that gave it the shape of some elongated human skull. This thing was his own. He knew that at once. Maybe it wasn’t, at first glance, as fearsome as the bear, maybe it was cold-blooded, maybe it was grasping, but it was his. There were monsters such as these in every sea there was. It could have followed him all the way from the coast of England.

Hickey stripped off his jacket and shirt, ignoring the way he seemed to freeze up brittle all at once. He walked to the rail.

All these questions back behind him: what was the matter with him, what the hell did he think he was doing.

The creature thrashed its long limbs about. Were there truly more than eight, or did it just seem so when they were flying through the air and smacking against the deck? It had chopped the intractable ice around them into a slurry. Frost and spray lit up on Hickey’s face, his hair, his eyelashes, his smiling lips.

He held out one bare arm. A smear of pale, not-too-clean flesh. The long line of a blue vein.

Here.

The creature’s eyes met his.

With a visceral wet slapping sound, one of its tentacles wrapped tight around his offering.

“It’ll drag him overboard!”

“He must want it to, he’s gone mad.”

Its suckers flattened down flush against his skin. It was a hot ripple of pain, warmer than anything he’d felt in months on end, and a sheet of blood was torn from him and fell to the deck, to the ice, to the creature’s eager little cups. It held onto him with the devotion of a lover. He did not blink. He felt the two of them grow entangled. Fingers laced together, hands held above a man’s head as you moved into him. It knew all his thoughts. And he knew its, simple but immense, slow and bloody. Near-eternal.

They would bring summer here, the two of them, would forge the Passage itself if it could not be found. Take _Terror_ and _Erebus_ and such men as were bold enough to stay aboard them, with these strange captains, into warmer waters. All such uncharted territory.


End file.
